I spoke about CooperUnionCommons.org at the Cooper Union Great Hall

(From Save Cooper Union! A Community Summit December 5, 2011)

My name is Jason Paul —, Art 2000. I’m a designer and web developer. I helped create the CooperUnionCommons.org online community with Karina Tipton. The Save Cooper Union Facebook page has demonstrated how much students and alumni care about Cooper and want to be connected. We saw that Facebook is a fantastic entry point for conversation however its aggregation limitations quickly become apparent. Cooper Union Commons was born out of a desire for a niche social network to help forge a stronger Cooper-centric online community. The ideal I have for the network is to help keep Cooper students and alumni connected to each other in perpetuity. I believe a network like this could be introduced to students from day one as one of the main means of communication for the school. After graduation, instead of losing access to the network, they would simply keep their membership to the network increasing the likelihood that alumni will remain involved in the the social world of Cooper Union.

(below) is the part of the speech I skipped to save on time

Cooper Union Commons runs on Buddypress which is a plugin for the open source platform WordPress. We’re treating this as a beta in that anyone is welcome to join the network and contribute. An advantage of a tool like this over Facebook is that if there’s a feature you think would be useful for the site all you have to do is request it. If we can get it and it will enhance the network then we’ll install it.

The Cooper Union Commons won’t replace Facebook, the Alumni site or any other official Cooper channels. All it seeks is to be a niche social network where informal Cooper conversations can continue. The network can only succeed if it is embraced by the Cooper Union community. I encourage you all to sign up and contribute your ideas. The url is cooperunioncommons.org

Update:

Here’s a YouTube of me speaking. I’m sandwiched between Sean Cusak and Henry Chapman. I speak at around 8:43.